24 Hours of Terror: A Halloween Horrorthon

Halloween is every horror nerd's favourite holiday. It's a great excuse for us all to spend a day indulging in horror movies. With this post I thought I would take the concept of a day of horror to its (il)logical conclusion and suggest a full 24 hours (1440 minutes) of horror movies you can watch in order to entirely devote your day to the darkest corners of cinema.

I've got it down to the minute, so you'll either want to have a kettle set up and sandwiches on standby or, perhaps a better idea, split the films over a couple of days, which you can do this year given that Halloween itself falls on a Saturday.

Fight For Your Life

The films I've chosen here aren't all easy to get hold of, but I want you to be able to see them, so I've gone for the underseen, the underrated... and one modern classic, rather than total obscurities. I've also stuck entirely to films that I have seen, so I can know that each of the 16 films I'm suggesting is one that I would recommend as, at the very least, a good film (nothing less than 7/10 on our blood droplet scale). That doesn't mean they're all masterpieces, but the ones that aren't are certainly great entertainments.

I'm not going to suggest an order. The list encompasses slasher flicks, serial killers, ghosts, zombies, home invasion, giallo, vampires and more besides. I'll leave you to decide how you wish to order them should you want to watch the whole programme (let me know if you do, I'd be intrigued to find out how it works for you). So, without further ado, let's look very briefly at each of the films, in alphabetical order.

The Black Panther (1977, 98 Mins)

Extremely realistic and utterly chilling serial killer film from the UK. Based on a real case, it charts how Donald Neilson progressed from burglary to spur of the moments murders, to a meticulously planned and brutal kidnapping. I wonder whether the makers of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Roberto Succo saw it.

Closet Land (1991, 92 Mins)

Set entirely in a single room, this two hander is an escalating interrogation by government official Alan Rickman of Madeline Stowe, who plays a children's author suspected of inserting seditious material into her latest story. A tense and deeply uncomfortable film with great performances from Rickman and the often underrated Stowe.

Closet Land

Cold Comfort (1989, 90 Mins)
Skip the recently released Awaiting and see this, which deals in many of the same ideas, instead. Maury Chaykin plays a trucker who takes an unconscious accident victim (Paul Gross) home. Initially Chaykin and his daughter (Margaret Langrick) take care of him, but it soon becomes clear that he is a prisoner, intended as a gift for the daughter. An intense and convincing piece of psychological horror, with great performances.

Don't Torture a Duckling (1975, 105 Mins)
It's only relatively recently that Lucio Fulci has been given his dues as a filmmaker. This, for me, might be his very best film. It's a disquieting Giallo that sees an entire town become suspicious and fearful when children begin to be murdered. The mystery is reasonably well told, but the mood is what's striking, be it in the mob violence that results in a brutal chain whipping scene or Barbara Bouchet's unsettlingly sexualised performance.

Fight For Your Life (1977, 85 Mins)
Home invasion films were something of a staple of the Video Nasties list, this may not be the most violent, but it's certainly the most difficult to watch. A gang of escaped convicts, led by virulently racist Jesse Lee Cain (William Sanderson) take a middle class black family hostage and proceed to intimidate and torture them, until they fight back. The narrative is standard stuff, but it's strikingly acted and the politics still resonate.

Killer's Moon (1978, 92 Mins)
A very odd British proto-slasher finds a group of teenage girls stranded at a hotel closed for the winter, on what happens to be the night that a group of murderers on a new drug therapy that asks them to indulge their every fantasy escapes a local asylum. It doesn't end prettily. There are some great ideas here and the actors playing the killers are fantastic. This ought to be a cult classic.

Lair of the White Worm (1989, 93 Mins)
This is the 'worst' film I'm recommending. It's an outrageously camp Bram Stoker adaptation with Amanda Donohoe as a seductive woman who turns out to be some sort of snake/vampire/monster. Director Ken Russell, typically, turns everything up to 11. By any usual standards it's rubbish, but it's also tremendous fun.

Popcorn

Lake Mungo (2008, 87 Mins)
I'm no fan of either ghost movies or found footage, but this Australian film manages to do both effectively. By framing itself as a TV documentary, Lake Mungo lends an extra layer of verisimilitude to its question of whether or not probable murder victim Alice has been haunting her family home. The acting maintains the real world illusion and the chills up your spine work even on multiple viewings. By the way, stay for the end credits.

Martyrs (2008, 99 Mins)
The modern classic. I can't imagine programming a day of horror (for adults) without this film. It hits so many buttons for me, as well as being one of the great examples of several different horror subgenres, the way it invites us to reevaluate the genre and our relationship to its characters continues to fascinate. It's also fucking terrifying.

Popcorn (1991, 86 Mins)
Jill Schoelen is a sadly underrated scream queen and, outside of The Stepfather ('87), this is her best horror role. She plays one of a student film society who screen a rare horror film to raise money, of course it turns out that the killer from the film isn't dead, is at the screening and is after Schoelen. It's hokey stuff, but a lot of fun.

Requiem (2006, 88 Mins)
Exorcism films are another subgenre I'm pretty tired of, but this German example, based rather more closely on the same case that inspired The Exorcism of Emily Rose, is one of the best. The fear is all the more intense for the fact that the film remains totally grounded in the real. Everything here could be seen as a natural illness just easily as it could be framed as possession. Sandra Hüller's extraordinary and entirely sympathetic performance grounds it perfectly, and makes it scarier, because horror is always more unnerving when it happens to someone we care about.

See The Sea (1997, 52 Mins)
This may skirt closer to a psychological thriller, but throughout Francois Ozon's breakthrough short there is something worryingly off about Marina DeVan, as a drifter that new mother Sasha Hails allows to camp outside her house. It's a slow build, but the performances more than carry the film, and the shocking denouement is pure horror.

See The Sea

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986, 101 Mins)
It seems that this much maligned and belated sequel is finally being reclaimed for the tremendous entertainment it is. While other Chainsaw sequels have tried (read 'failed') to recapture the grinding terror of the original, Tobe Hooper knew better, throwing it out for a gory parody. The effects are fantastic, Caroline Williams makes for a strong and feisty final girl and the off the wall tone and performances are often hilarious. As long as you don't expect this to be like the first film, it's great. And hey, how can you dislike a film with Dennis Hopper using two chainsaws to fight Leatherface?

The Ugly (1997, 90 Mins)
This New Zealand film has shades of The Silence of the Lambs in its framing device, as a psychiatrist interviews a serial killer in prison, a little Henry in its flashbacks of him growing up and becoming a killer and a stylised eye to draw them together. It's not the most original of films and the supporting performances can be a little too winkingly OTT, but the excellent leads, the clean design, the use of colour and the black blood that is so strikingly used all make it stand out.

Wasting Away (2007, 96 Mins)

An overlooked zombie comedy that approaches the zombie film from the perspective of the undead. When a group of friends are turned, they don't realise it. We see both how they perceive things (as if the world has gone crazy and they are the only normal people left) and the reality that they are now shambling corpses with a thirst for brains. The conceit seems thin, but it holds together and the jokes stay fresh, even if the cast don't.



So, there you have it, 24 hours of recommended horror. I hope at least a few are new to you. If you decide to include any or all of these in your Halloween weekend then please let us know how you get on, either in the comments or on Twitter @AOTDBlog or @24FPSUK.

Sam's 2013 in Horror

It's that time of year again, when we start reflecting on what we've seen in the past 12 months. I was going to write a Top Ten, discussing the best the genre had offered up this year, then I thought about it and, frankly, I didn't have enough to work with.  That's not to say that I didn't see great things in horror this year, the problem runs deeper than that, it's that I didn't see great horror films getting released this year.

I should say at this juncture that I still have to catch up with You're Next and Big Bad Wolves, which I'm expecting good things from, but I saw plenty besides and, damn, if you just went by what came to cinemas you'd think we'd had a really bad year.

The Year in Remakes

I guess in terms of numbers it hasn't been an awful year (and I suppose Chainsaw 3D is debatable, but it certainly plays like a - staggeringly poor - remake, as do most of the other Chainsaw sequels), but holy shit, feel the distinct lack of quality.  From the gimmicky (Maniac) to the tediously faithful (Carrie), on through the misjudged reimagining (Evil Dead, a film already retroactively spoofed, because Cabin in the Woods exists) to the pure ineptitude of the worst film of 2013 (TC3D), it's been another year that has had me wanting to scream at Hollywood for its lack of imagination, its lack of faith in unknown properties and its lack of effort in delivery.

The people I really want to scream at, however, are the audiences.  I want to walk up to them afterwards and say I HAVE to see these films, but you're part of the problem, stop coming and maybe, just maybe, Hollywood will be forced to make an effort next year.  This trend, these colour photocopies of films, almost always degraded from their original forms, genuinely depresses me and makes it tough to be a horror fan, especially when people I know ask me 'why would you want to go and see that'?  Too often, especially if you live outside London, the answer is 'I don't, there just aren't any other choices right now'.


The Best Wide Release Horror Film Of The Year (kind of sucks)

In 2013, using a reasonably wide definition of the genre, just 14 horror films were given a wide (150-300 screen) or saturation (more than 300 screen) release in the UK.  In four months of the year - including October - not a single horror film was given a wide or saturation release.  I missed just three; You're Next, Insidious: Chapter 2, for reasons that may soon become clear and World War Z, because I really hate 3D and the trailer looked awful.  The best of these high profile releases was The Conjuring, which, were I grading it on the scale we use here, would probably scrape six blood drops out of ten.  This isn't a rare phenomenon, but it is a profoundly depressing one for the genre, and I think it's also what contributes to films as overwhelmingly average as The Conjuring  (which is well crafted and acted, but beat for beat the same haunted house movie we've been watching for years now) getting such a good reception.

I wonder whether critics and audiences have been beaten down, exposed to so much awful horror cinema, especially mainstream horror cinema, that they have come to be so refreshed by anything that isn't dreadful that it looks brilliant against the prevailing backdrop of the genre.  

What really surprised me with The Conjuring was the contrast between the reported audience reaction and the reaction depicted in the film's take on the now trendy night vision trailer, observing an audience watching the film.  I heard reports of people screaming and being freaked out by the movie (and this was true of a group of girls in my screening), but the night vision trailer seemed to find such footage hard to come by.  I swear you can spot one audience member falling asleep, which is a bit of an advertising own goal.

There must, I suppose, be an appetite for these films (I've taken to calling them 'noises off movies'), but mine was sated long, long ago and the fact that I can't think of a better wide release horror film this year than a stylish but ultimately totally by the book take on this well worked over genre deeply saddens me.


The River of Shit

This is the description I've been using for the 'efforts' of mainstream Hollywood for a while now.  The river doesn't just flow through the horror genre, but it certainly floats a lot of crap past multiplex projectors every year.  I missed only a handful; the aforementioned Insidious Chapter 2 and World War Z and The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia, the title of which simply screamed "LAZY BULLSHIT".  I barely remember most of the mainstream releases this year (for instance I had completely forgotten that the rubbish Guillermo DelToro produced effort Mama came out in 2013), and those I do recall I don't think of in what you'd call complimentary terms.

Joining Ghosts of Georgia in the 'nonsensically titled sequels' category we have The Last Exorcism: Part 2 (which makes the first film at best the penultimate exorcism, and that's just the tip of a veritable iceberg of stupid).  The Last Exorcism was genuinely refreshing, it was the first film in ages to use found footage well and boasted a charismatic and charming performance from Ashley Bell.  The sequel dumps the former and mutes the latter, and that's to say nothing of the fact that the first film had - idiotic though it was - a pretty clear ending.

The Purge, which sits somewhat on the margins of the genre, but was definitely marketed as and played very much like horror, was another letdown; a film with a strong idea (what would happen if all crime was legal for a single night?) but execution that squandered that idea, reducing it to just one more home invasion film, with shades of the hoodie horror that has recently been in vogue.

Perhaps the worst of a weak mainstream crop this year was Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, admittedly having the grown up Hansel and Gretel hunting and killing witches is another cool idea, but bizarre casting (Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton's age difference is glaringly obvious), a by the numbers screenplay, stunted sense of fun and extremely bored looking cast all conspire to make this the one thing it should never have been; dull.


The Good Stuff (nobody fucking saw)

It's not that there weren't good horror films released in 2013, it's just that almost nobody saw them.  In many cases this was hardly something that could be blamed on the audiences, as most of the better horror films of the year got only limited or 'Key Cities' distribution, meaning that only a handful of screens were showing the best of the genre this year and that most people would have had to go far out of their way to catch them.  It's tough to blame anyone for waiting for DVD when the only screen showing a film is so far away that the travel can take longer and cost more than seeing the film, especially when you add that to the frequent frustrations of the cinema.

Here are my picks for Top 3 horror films that actually saw a release in the UK in 2013.
3: Byzantium

2: Sleep Tight

1: Antiviral

Of those the only one I can wholeheartedly recommend is Antiviral, which is a striking debut from chip off the old body-horror block Brandon Cronenberg with a troubling premise about the extent of celebrity worship and a great performance from Caleb Landry-Jones (whose awful showing in Byzantium is one reason I can't recommend that as highly).  Sleep Tight is a tense little twist on the home invasion film, it has some extremely creepy scenes and an intense performance from Luis Tosar, but I couldn't escape the feeling that I'd seen this movie several times before and while I enjoyed it and will surely see it again Sleep Tight didn't really stand out for me the way it did for many horror fans.  Byzantium, similarly, was for me a film that had several outstanding elements (chiefly the performances of and dynamic between Saoirse Ronan and Gemma Arterton), but wrapped them in a shell that, while stylish, just felt a bit overfamilliar to me.

All that said, all of those are strong films, all of them have much that is worth recommending and none of them were widely seen.  Byzantium had the best chance, it came out on a little over 300 screens but, while it opened in a light week, it was up against the higher profile and larger screen count of The Purge and likely lost much of its potential audience to that film.  The other two played on only a handful of screens, with Antiviral getting only a short platform release, largely to promote the DVD release that followed immediately.  This (and the similar pattern for the release of Katie Aselton's solid mumblecore horror Black Rock) suggests that distributors are admitting defeat at the cinema.  I understand why; it's tough to take on the big companies and their huge releases, but it's a disservice to horror fans because it makes it harder to see the few really strong film that ARE picked up for release. 


The Great Stuff (doesn't have fucking distribution)

This is how backward UK distribution of horror films has, largely, become.  The river of shit flows through multiplexes at a rate of roughly 1 film a month.  Better films get limited releases, before swift DVD and BluRay releases in hopes that they will find a foothold in the home market.  The best films stay at festivals.  SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE!

I went to one horror festival this year and saw many more films as we attempted, early in 2013, to get an Afraid of the Dark festival up and running (an idea that has not gone away).  I saw a lot of things I didn't like, but every one of the best horror films I saw in 2013 came through one of these channels.

Frightfest threw up some interesting things, with even films that didn't entirely work often having strong elements.  Sadik 2 was a good example of this.  It's not a sequel, rather a film about the making of a sequel to a notorious torture film.  It's essentially a really good short dressed up as middling feature, but there are some cool ideas and fun gore scenes in it.

Among the more mainstream leaning films at Frightfest the best I saw was the new film from Cube and Splice director Vincenzo Natali.  Haunter starts off just looking like one more generic haunted house movie (like a little film you might have heard of called The Conjuring), but after setting the pieces the film evolves, revealing a clever premise and, at its centre, a strong female character played by an excellent Abigail Breslin.  This is the film that I'm mystified not to have seen picked up yet; it feels commercial, but is smarter and better than most of the commercial horror out there.

2013 also threw up some fun genre leaning documentaries, such as An American Haunting; a affectionate look at people who build semi-professional haunted houses in their back yards for Halloween and On Tender Hooks, which looks at the subculture surrounding and the experience of human suspension, and is not for the needle phobic.  This is where the genre is really broadening out, and I wish it was more exposed.

I can't really separate the two best horror films of the year, both were films I watched as submissions for the Afraid of the Dark festival.  Jug Face, an extremely promising debut for director Chad Crawford Kinkle, is a backwoods horror about a community that worships a pit.  The pit demands sacrifices, and they are chosen when one of the men of the village makes a jug, the face on that jug will be the face of the next sacrifice.  This is a fun concept and when things go predictably wrong they get entertainingly bloody, but the strength of Jug Face lies beyond its bloodletting.  The screenplay is well written, and draws its horror from more than just the rituals surrounding the pit, but the film is anchored by a sensitive performance from Lauren Ashley Carter, building on the promise she showed in Lucky McKee's The Woman.  I don't want to give much away, but Jug Face is well worth a watch.

The second of the best horror films of 2013 was The Battery, a largely two handed drama about two former baseball players wandering and trying to survive in a post zombie apocalypse New England.  This film, though it does feature some well staged and tense zombie attacks, is largely driven by its characters, by the different ways they have reacted to this new reality and by the way they essentially power each other on (they are The Battery of the title).  The film relies on its dialogue, characterisation and performances to power it between infrequent outbursts of action (a welcome relief when most horror seems to go for the opposite ratio), and even when zombie attacks do break out, as in the outstanding final setpiece, which takes place entirely inside a stationary car, the characters are always the centre of the film.  It's a refreshing take on the zombie movie.

I don't know how we go about solving the distribution woes that, for my money, are running the horror genre down.  I only hope that here at Afraid of the Dark we can point out that as bleak as the wide release picture may look, if you dig there are still outstanding new horror films out there to be seen.

Review Roulette

Yes we're taking requests.  Tweet @AOTDBlog with the title of a film you'd like us to review and each week we'll draw two suggestions at random, I'll review one and Steve will review the other.  We may also offer short rebuttals to each other's reviews.  This week I'm a little envious: Steve got one of my favourite mainstream American horror films of the last couple of years and I got...

Book of Blood

Dir: John Harrison

Book of cliches.  Okay, we're done here, right?  I mean, that about says it all.  Steve, can you just put a picture and the grade on here and we'll call it a day?  What do you mean I'm fired?  Oh, okay then.

From what I understand, Book of Blood is based on the wraparound story from Clive Barker's similarly titled anthology, The Books of Blood.  It opens with a character covered in terrible scars (Jonas Armstrong).  After having a spot of breakfast (it's the most important meal of the day you know) he's being tortured.  The torturer remarks of his victim "you're a book of blood" and this is our cue to cut into a long flashback explaining how this story and many others ended up cut into this man's flesh (presumably in very tiny writing).  Armstrong turns out to be a university student named Simon.  He's taking a class on the paranormal from Professor Mary Florescu (Sophie Ward), who is also researching a house in which a murder took place that she believes was paranormal (so do we, given that we saw it in the opening of this story).  Mary discovers that in the past Simon has shown clairvoyant abilities and so drafts him in to help with her research, which means that she, Simon and another researcher will be staying in the house.  While they're there things both spooky and sexual begin to happen with the question being  whether any of those events were real or if they are all in Mary's head.

Good God it's dull.  In all seriousness, Book of Blood isn't without plus points.  Ward and Armstrong both acquit themselves reasonably well, and the chemistry between them is off in a way that works for the did they/didn't they question the film poses.  It also has a few reasonably striking images of gore and violence, not least an unseen force peeling a teenage girl's face off.  The problem is that neither the images nor the narrative present anything terribly new.  We've all seen hundreds of these films that ask whether characters are staying in a haunted house or whether they're simply imagining things.  This question is hardly helped by the opening narration or the fact the film is structured as a long flashback; it's not as if we're going to get to the end and the main character is going to say "actually nothing happened, turns out Mary has bad dreams".  This also means that the bulk of the film, and particularly  a key fake out, just feels like stretching things out so the film can get to feature length.

The bloody imagery also feels pretty derivative.  The first scene of the flashback story, involving the unseen force and the teenage girl, is a good example; it goes a little further in terms of explicitness, but it's not much more than a variation on Tina's death in the original Nightmare on Elm Street.  This is a good indication of the general feeling of the gore, it's not so much that you can point to a shot and say 'that's from that movie' so much as it is that Book of Blood just feels uninventive.  You can't always put your finger on it, but there's always a sneaking suspicion that you've seen that shot before.  By the time it gets around to confirming what you've already known for a good hour (not least because the movie told you in its first few seconds) I would imagine you will have, as I had, checked out of Book of Blood.

Ultimately this isn't an awful film, but it's extremely middle of the road, presenting adequate performances and a script and imagery that never tell or show us anything we've not heard or seen many times before in many better films.

SAM'S SCORE

AOTD Recommends

In this column I (and hopefully other staff and guests) will be recommending horror films that you can watch on the UK's two biggest streaming services; Lovefilm and Netflix as well as the US Netflix.

Lovefilm

Mother's Day

Editor Steve and I are planning a podcast on horror remakes which, generally speaking, I loathe.  Mother's Day, however, is one of those rare films that gives the idea of remakes a good name.  Based on a Troma film (which I am assured is absolutely bloody dreadful), Darren Lynn Bousman's take on the material is a brutal and nasty home invasion horror anchored by a set of impressive performances.

Rebecca DeMornay gets and relishes her best role in years as the mother of a criminal brood who invade her old home looking for money that they have been sending her from their jobs.  DeMornay is at first a calming influence, but behind that lies real psychosis.  She plays this dichotomy with her tongue just far enough in her cheek.  

The home invasion narrative works well and the film has a nasty streak a mile wide (a scene at an ATM is especially brutal, while not actually showing much gore).  It does go a little off the rails when the action becomes more overblown towards the end, but the performances (Deborah Ann Woll is another standout), the tension and a haunting, if not completely unexpected, ending more than compensate for that.

Netflix US

Don't Go In The Woods

Don't Go In The Woods is not a good movie, he said, attempting some sort of record for understatement.  The video nasties list has a great deal of crap on it, but this sorry excuse for a backwoods horror movie may be the worst of them.  So why am I recommending it?  Well, sometimes something is so bad that it passes right through badness and becomes highly entertaining, and that's what happens here.

Thrill to the abysmal dialogue, be stunned by the inept cast, gasp at the plot involving more aimless walking than four Tolkein movies (in barely 80 minutes).  It's probably also a good idea to warn you that the score for this film is likely to make you want to burst your eardrums with a rusty nail, consisting as it does of what sounds like a composer giving up and simply hitting random keys on a Casio my first keyboard.

The 'horror' scenes are no better.  The mountain man make up, which rips off The Hills Have Eyes, appears to have been accomplished on a budget of approximately 17 cents.  The violence is laughably choreographed: one death scene has the victim obviously holding the spear 'impaling' him under his arm and in another a character is decapitated in daylight only for his body to roll down the hill at night.  You can't afford to miss this, is what I'm saying.

Netflix UK

We Are The Night

Dennis Gansel's playful vampire movie isn't totally successful as it needs, among other things, an extra twenty minutes to add some psychological depth to the characters, but it is a great deal of fun.  The brilliant Nina Hoss (seriously, if you've not heard of her look her up, she's one of the best actresses working right now) plays a lesbian vampire queen who falls for and turns Karoline Herfurth's juvenile delinquent the same day Herfurth has met and fallen for a good-natured cop.

The rest of Hoss' small gang (Jennifer Ulrich and Anna Fisher) have great fun being vampires, but Herfurth is more conflicted, seduced by the fact that the vampires seem to drip with money and be able to do just about anything they want but repelled by killing and not really into the idea of becoming Hoss' latest plaything.  The performances are strong all round, with Nina Hoss having a ball hamming it up, her icy beauty both perfect for her casting and a counterpoint to the character and Herfurth trying to give the film an emotional centre, which is where it falls down thanks to some thin writing.

Still, We Are The Night is a lot of fun and also manages some strong, reasonably large scale, action and effects sequences and at the very least it will introduce you to some great actresses.

Severed Headlines

Hi and welcome to AOTD's weekly horror news roundup.  If you have a story for us, or you want to promote something horror related please email details to sam@24fps.org.uk.  Thanks.

The Week in Remake News

Because the movie gods continue to hate the genre, no week goes by without the announcement of yet another horror remake.  This time it's the turn of Pet Semetary, which will be directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, whose last genre outing was the unremittingly awful Intruders and of cult classic Sleepaway Camp, which has much of the key talent behind the original on board.  I suspect we will end up seeing the Pet Semetary remake, along with more Stephen King updates if they continue to do well, but the Sleepaway Camp project has the distinct whiff of something that could fall through.

In further remake news the sequel to the Evil Dead remake has apparently lost the creative team behind this year's film.  It remains to be seen whether the film will move forward, and whether it will use the (STUPID) credits stinger as a jumping off point.

They're Creepy and They're Kooky and They're... Animated?

I love the 90's Addams Family films (especially the sequel, which contains what may still be Christina Ricci's best work), but it was always likely that the characters would be rebooted now that whole generation has not seen them on TV or at the cinema.  Happily this new project seems not to be a remake but a CG animated take that will apparently go back to Charles Addams' cartoons for inspiration.  Pamela Pettler, having penned Monster House and The Corpse Bride, seems well suited to scripting duties.  I'm looking forward to hearing more on this one.

Horror DVD and BR Releases

UK (Nov. 4th)

The People Under The Stairs [Blu]

I've never seen this 1991 Wes Craven movie, but you can bet I'll be rectifying that with what looks to be a typically stellar release from Arrow Video with a restored print, a commentary from star Brandon Quinton Adams and loads of other video and written extras.

USA (Nov. 4th)

Under the Dome [DVD / Blu]

The only notable genre release of the week in the US is the first season of this TV adaptation of Stephen King's novel.  Typically of King the novel had a great premise but cardboard cut out characters and a terrible ending.  I hope this will rectify at least one of those things, but bear in mind that it was shown on Channel 5 over here, which doesn't bode especially well.

Books

Auteur Publishing have just published two new entries in their Devil's Advocate series of books on horror films, this time examining Carrie and John Carpenter's The Thing.  The series promises a blend of critical analysis, opinion on the film under discussion and background on the productions.  I'd suggest that they would be ideal for horror fans who have a background or an interest in film studies.

Interestingly, given where we started this set of news stories, both books also address the idea of remakes; the Carpenter film is one, the DePalma about to get one.

Lost Horrors: Carrie [2002]

In this series I will be looking at horror films that have fallen through the cracks; the obscure, the underseen, the underrated, the lost.

As the latest version of Carrie is due to be released in the UK in just a few weeks I thought it would be a good idea to kick this column off with a look at the mostly forgotten TV Movie from 2002, which was apparently supposed to kick off a Carrie TV series.

This largely forgotten version feels not so much like a remake of Brian DePalma's film as it does a modern (well modern in 2002, which is surprisingly old fashioned now, as this is a high school without smartphones or even YouTube) adaptation of Stephen King's novel.  Writer Bryan Fuller and director David Carson retain a few things that DePalma jettisoned, take a different tone with some of the performances and update some of the dialogue intelligently.  Unfortunately this is not to say that the film is a total success, but it's seldom less than interesting.

The first place that this Carrie really scores is in the casting of the title role.  Sissy Spacek is indelible as Carrie White, making the part a mountain for any actress to climb.  Angela Bettis, who was cast on the strength of her work in May though Carrie would be seen first by the public, is ideal casting.  She's not Spacek and doesn't attempt to copy her, but Bettis shares some inherent qualities that are integral to the role.  Make no mistake, Angela Bettis is a strikingly good looking young woman, but her beauty has a quiet, almost mousy, quality that easily blends in to the background, especially when you set her against the likes of Emilie DeRavin's dolled up Chris Hargensen.  You can believe that Bettis' Carrie would be ignored at high school, were it not for the fact that she is strange and that her peers are aware of her restrictive upbringing with her extremely conservative religious mother (played here by Patricia Clarkson).  Bettis' look also works in another way; her transformation into the pretty girl who goes to prom is both credible and a real change of look.

Of course Bettis' performance goes much more than skin deep, and in this way she's also very different from her predecessor.  Spacek's Carrie always seems scared, but there is something different about Bettis in the role; an anger that seems ever present and a knowledge that that anger can be destructive.  This leads to a subtly different take on the scenes of telekinesis.  Spacek's Carrie seems to gradually gain control over her powers, but we never feel that from Bettis.  Even at the prom she seems overtaken, frozen by her powers.  

An additional scene in which Sue Snell (a creditable performance from Kandyse McClure) helps Carrie pick out a lipstick for the dance adds colour and a little more social nous to the character.  There are a few additions and changes like this, and most are welcome.  New dialogue when Chris Hargensen's plan for revenge against Carrie is first mooted is both period appropriate and funny “We should have a rule: If they do something in a Freddie Prinze Jr. movie, we're not allowed to do it in real life.”  Even better is the extending of the bullying of Carrie, which takes the 'plug it up' moment and – though it depicts it less explicitly – makes it more public and just as cruel.  There are nice little moments scattered throughout the film that seperate it from the DePalma version and make Carrie a subtly different character (her line about breasts to her mother is also extended and works really well).

There are two big changes.  One works reasonably well, the other almost brings the whole film crashing down.  Carrie, the novel, is one of Stephen King's most unconventionally structured; written as if pieced together from reports about the prom incident and what went before it.  This film attempts to reflect that by having survivors interviewed by the Police.  It's a nice idea, and gives the film a different feel from the original, but the internal logic of the structure isn't always maintained and it does rely on some patchy performances when it cuts away from Kandyse McClure.  The ending, on the other hand, is laugh out loud ludicrous, so bad it nearly retrospectively destroys what was good about the film in the first place.  I'll just say that the last five minutes attempt to set up a TV series that would have co-starred Sue Snell and leave you to imagine the plot contortions and how awful they are.

This version of Carrie is somewhat schizophrenic in its quality.  You can enjoy the coiled menace of Patricia Clarkson's performance as Margaret White, which takes a radically different approach to the more nakedly unhinged Piper Laurie to fine effect, but at the same time the cramped framing – frequently in close up – and general try too hard feeling of David Carson's direction can be off putting.  To his credit Carson doesn't imitate Brian DePalma, but the effects he sometimes tries look cheesy and there is just a sense that he's overegging the pudding through his direction because TV rules mean that he can't show much violence.  There are other problems too, notably with the supporting cast and especially with Jesse Cadotte, who is terrible as Billy Nolan, and makes you long for something as restrained as John Travolta's hammy turn in the original film.

I only discovered that this version of Carrie existed because I'm a fan of Angela Bettis, but does it deserve to be dug up?  I think so.  It's a long, long way from perfect and it can be a frustrating watch because you want to shout at the director and the editor, especially in the last five minutes.  However, the leading performances are excellent and the film distinguishes itself enough from the DePalma version that it does feel like it can stand on its own.  At the very least it's an interesting curio for fans of Bettis, Clarkson and King.

Intro to Horror: Sam on Zombie Flesh Eaters

In this series our writers will be exploring what got them into the horror genre and which films (or books) they would recommend as a grounding in the genre for those who are just beginning their exploration.  First to confess all is AOTD's Film Editor Sam Inglis.

I grew up as a big movie fan from the age of ten or eleven, but came to the horror genre late.  My first interest in horror arose not through movies but through the news.  When the James Bulger case made the headlines it appalled me both because of the crime itself and because the perpetrators turned out to be just a year younger than me, but even aged eleven I could see that blaming a film (Child's Play 3) for the crime was stupid.  This led, over the next few years, to an increasing interest in censorship and the banning of films, which obviously meant horror films.

My parents, however, were pretty strict and though I must have seen a few over the years their ban on my watching unsuitable films was remarkably effective for a long time (and when I did finally begin to secretly overturn it I went to Showgirls first, because that came out on tape when I was 15 and promised a lot of boobs).  I only really began to discover horror films properly when I left home, which also happened to coincide with the beginnings of the biggest liberalisation in BBFC history and the first time release of some of the 'video nasties' that I had heard so much about.

My Intro to Horror

ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS (Lucio Fulci)

I'm sure I had seen horror films before this one, but Zombie Flesh Eaters (which I initially saw on a slightly cut VHS I got from a second hand shop where I was living in Whitstable) was the first to really make me sit up and take notice of the genre and particularly of its more extreme end which is what I, to some degree, now specialise in.  My interest was piqued by the cover (see left) but also by the fact that the film had been banned and was not, in 1999, yet available in its uncut form in the UK.  Censorship was the initial catalyst for my interest in horror and that interest in censorship and this entry point continue to power my love of the genre to a great degree.

Being able to buy the film was no sure thing.  At 18 I still looked annoyingly young and could easily have passed for about 14 (I mind this less now that I'm 32), so going up to the counter with something with an adult certificate was always a gamble, but the guy at this shop didn't, I suspect, much care how old I was, so getting the film was relatively simple.  I think I had seen a couple of zombie films before, including the original Dawn of the Dead, but I had never warmed to them. This time, however, I was grabbed immediately thanks to the style of Lucio Fulci's filmmaking.

Zombie Flesh Eaters (which also goes by the names Zombie and Zombi 2) opens with a striking image of a corpse being shot in the head, before cutting to a deserted ship floating on the Hudson River.  The scene that unfolds on this ghost ship shows off many of Fulci's strengths.  There is a sense of foreboding as the cops explore the boat, looking for signs of life, along with some nice gross out images, and then a well realised and brutal zombie attack, complete with great effects courtesy of Gianetto DiRossi, one of the great masters of effects make up.

On this first viewing and subsequent watches up to when the Blu Ray came out and revealed for the first time what an incredible looking film Zombie Flesh Eaters really is, I essentially viewed it as a fun piece of gory hokum.  It works brilliantly on this level, and is an ideal gateway drug for someone looking to get into extreme horror (which is something I'll explore further in the second part of this article).  I found it hard to see what people would find all that offensive about the film, what with its ludicrous plot about voodoo zombies eating the inhabitants of a Caribbean island and the tongue in cheek performances of British actors Richard Johnson and Ian McCulloch in the leads it seemed hard to take the gore all that seriously.

Fulci is also, I suspect, winking at the camera at certain points.  In these terms one scene sticks out, in which Auretta Gay goes swimming and encounters a shark, which is then attacked by a zombie.  This scene has no bearing on the plot, seeming instead to exist simply because somebody thought that a scene of a zombie ripping a chunk out of a shark would be cool.  They were right.  It is cool.  All of the effects scenes were cool and if anything the fact that they were sometimes frustratingly incomplete on this VHS meant that I was even more sucked in, even more determined to see the complete versions and dig deeper into this kind of movie.  The most annoying moment came with the famous splinter in the eye gag, which cut away JUST as Olga Karlatos' eye was about to be speared.  In fact this scene works just as well in its censored or its uncensored version.  In the former the horror of that image is left off screen and unimaginable, in the latter it is fully and brilliantly realised in one of the most memorably disgusting images in the video nasties.

My first viewing of Zombie Flesh Eaters was conducted through the fog of the three curses of the VHS era; pan and scan, censorship and poor image quality, but still I could see a real filmmaker at work, someone with technical chops and a real identity and inventiveness behind the camera.  Sure, it's a silly film, but it's executed with verve and style and even when it's a bit rubbish (the dialogue scenes) it's never less than fun and engaging.  I've seen better films – several of them Fulci's  – in the extreme horror genre since, but Zombie Flesh Eaters will always have a special place in my twisted little heart, because it's the movie that started it all for me.

In the next Intro to Horror I'll be recommending 10 essential extreme horror films that can serve as a jumping off point for people who haven't explored it before.